Provoked (7 page)

David watched the young man for a moment, wrestling with himself. It was rare for men of their class to go to university, to move into the professions and achieve a better standard of living than that of the working families they’d come from. The thought of Euan giving up those aspirations after two years of study troubled David in ways he had difficulty putting into words. He thought of himself when he was a student, living in poverty, struggling to keep body and soul together but driven onwards by acquiring the education that he knew was the only way to change his life.

“I could help you with money,” David said at last. His tone held more confidence than he truly felt—his finances were not good at the moment, but with Chalmers’s sponsorship, there was every reason to think things would improve.

Euan shook his head, his cheeks red with humiliation. “I can make my own way in the world,” he said.

“Everyone needs help sometimes.”

“I thank you for your kindness, Davy, but I couldn’t accept.”

“Euan, I don’t mind—”

“If you want to help me, all you need to do is try to find Lees.” He paused before adding, “Have you managed to find anything out?”

Euan’s pride was frustrating, but David knew he’d be the same in the lad’s shoes, so he reluctantly acceded to Euan’s change of subject and began to discuss the results of his enquiries.

“I have a few members of the faculty still to rule out,” he concluded, “but so far, I’ve heard nothing to suggest there’s any woman called Isabella with an advocate father.”

“You don’t think she’s real, do you?”

David shrugged. “We both know that Lees could’ve been making her up as part of his story. Even if she’s real, what he told Peter could be part truth and part lies. Her real name could be different.”

Euan stared into the fire. “Peter said Lees was as drunk as a man can be and still able to talk. He was convinced Lees told him the truth that night.” Euan glanced at David again, his gaze a little desperate. “That’s all I have to go on.”

“I’ll keep looking into it,” David assured him. “I’ve not completely eliminated the possibility that it’s true. Not yet.”

The barmaid arrived with their dinner then. The plates she set down on the table were made of tin and very old. Each plate held two fat sausages smothered in onions. Hunks of bread were already soaking up the thick brown gravy.

Euan waited until David began eating before he touched his own dinner, but once he started, he ate quickly, as though he was famished. He’d finished his whole plate by the time David had eaten just one of his sausages. Noticing this, David pushed his plate towards the other man.

“I ate earlier,” he lied. “Do you want the rest of this?”

He feigned disinterest in Euan’s answer, turning his attention to his ale and drinking deeply. There was a long, still pause, then the younger man drew the plate towards him and bent his head to eat again. He ate David’s second sausage and meticulously scooped up all the onions and gravy with the bread. There wasn’t a crumb on either plate when he was done.

The barmaid came to collect the plates while Euan was pissing outside.

“Another ale and a wee jug of whisky,” David ordered, taking a purse of coins out of his coat pocket. “And I’ll pay you now.”

She named a sum, and he counted the coins into her hand; then she sailed away, her big bosom like the prow of a ship.

When Euan came back inside, he gave the fresh tankard waiting for him a troubled look. David knew if he met Euan’s eyes, the lad would protest, so he ignored him, giving him time to settle. He concentrated on his own drink instead, filling the little dram glass the barmaid had brought him almost to the brim. When he raised it to his lips, he didn’t drink immediately, just let the whisky lap at his mouth like a wave. The alcohol turned to vapour as soon as it touched him, alchemising into a cool breath of whisky on his lips. A wee kiss of it before he tipped the glass and let the first wet burn slide into his mouth and down his throat.

It was good, that feeling. He liked everything about it: the taste of the whisky, its fire. The way it numbed his overwrought mind; the way it made him feel—after a while—more relaxed and expansive.

He should watch himself, though. He didn’t feel as light-headed or hungry as when he’d left the library, but still, there wasn’t much in his stomach. He’d be dead drunk after a few drams at this rate.

“Thank you for the food, Davy. And the ale.”

“You’re welcome.” David smiled.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“No need.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Are you doing anything else to try to find Lees?” David asked, changing the subject. “Other than waiting to hear from me, I mean.”

“I’ve been looking for him,” Euan admitted. “I walk round the city every day. I’m getting to know Edinburgh well.”

“You know what he looks like, then?”

The young man nodded. “I used to go to meetings with Peter, till he made me stop. I met Lees a couple of times.”

“So what does he look like?”

Euan leaned back in his seat and stared into the fire. “Tall. Dark haired. An English-sounding voice. He’s got a funny way about him. Superior.”

“You didn’t like him,” David surmised.

The other man turned his head and met David’s questioning look with a serious gaze.

“Not a bit. I said so to Peter at the time.”

David finished the jug of whisky in the same time it took Euan to finish his single tankard of ale. When he stood up to leave, the room reeled, then slowly came to rights. The reaction surprised him—he hadn’t drunk
that
much—but the lack of food and sleep was telling on him now. He stumbled out of the tavern after Euan, wincing at the blast of cold air that hit them.

Euan pulled his cap over his ears. “When do you think you might learn more?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure. Shall we meet again next week?”

“Where shall we meet?” Euan asked. He averted his eyes, his expression embarrassed. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have the money to come to taverns and drink.”

David resisted the urge to say he’d pay. The lad’s pride had taken enough blows tonight. “Come to my rooms. I’m only round the corner from here, on Blair Street. Number twelve, on the second floor.”

Euan nodded. “Number twelve, second floor. When shall I come? Monday?”

“Best leave it till Tuesday. Come in the evening. After seven would be best.”

“All right. I don’t know how to thank you, Davy.”

“Just take care of yourself.”

“I will. G’night.”

“Good night.”

With that, Euan turned and hurried away. He was swallowed into the shadows within seconds, as though he’d never been there.

David stood looking after him for a minute, wondering where the lad was sleeping; then he crammed his own hat on and set off on the short walk home.

The usual pockets of ne’er-do-wells, prostitutes and ragged children lurked in every doorway on the way, some eyeing him malevolently, others pleading for a coin or offering favours for one. One of them, a girl, ventured closer, brushing up against him. Her dress was pulled down to expose a meagre bosom and her feet were bare. She was either desperate for a client or trying to steal something, her fingers whispering over the placket of his breeches. Her dead, calculating expression filled him with pity even as he pushed her firmly away.

At last he was home and trudging up the stone stairs of the close. He unlocked his front door and went inside, carefully locking up behind him. Going straight to the kitchen, he checked the larder. It was fairly bare, as usual. His stomach was gnawing with hunger, though, and he reached for the easiest thing to eat, a bit of cheese that was past its best. Paring away the rind, he ate it where he stood, then went to get ready for bed.

That night, he dreamed about William for the first time in years.

He was in the kirk at Midlauder, sitting in his family’s pew, except instead of his mother and father and Drew, it was William sitting next to him. Even though, in real life, William had always sat in the front pew with his father, Sir Thomas Lennox, and all the pretty Lennox girls. The most David had ever seen of William in church was the back of his head.

In the dream, though, William was sitting next to him, and, instead of his Sunday clothes, he was wearing a loose shirt and old breeches and had bare feet.

“Let’s go swimming, Davy,” he said, and his eyes gleamed with excitement. Eyes the same yellowy-green as the mossy bark on the old beech tree they liked to climb. There was a thick branch you could stand on and jump off, into the pond.

“I can’t, I’m in my Sunday clothes,” David said.

“No you’re not.”

He looked down, and no, he wasn’t. He was in his court gown. He put his hand to his head—he was wearing his court wig too. He drew it off, feeling silly. He was a man, then, not a boy.

And so, he realised, was William.

The open neck of William’s shirt displayed a swath of pale skin dusted with dark hair. His shoulders were broad and powerful, his thighs muscled from riding. He smiled at David, and his smile was inviting.

“William—” His stomach churned with excitement and shame. He wanted William the way a man wants a woman, and it was so very wrong to feel this way. Especially about his friend.

William didn’t say anything. He just reached for David’s breeches, unfastening the buttons and freeing his aching cock, then bending over to—Christ, was he going to put it in his mouth?

Helplessly, David reached for William’s head, wanting to guide him to his quarry. But then it all became farcical, silly. He couldn’t get hold of William, kept bucking his hips in a fruitless search for a warm, wet mouth that was proving to be completely elusive. He was almost weeping with frustration by the time he woke up, his limbs snarled in the bed sheets.

He lay, shaken, staring at the ceiling.

He hadn’t thought of William in a long time—until this business with Euan. Now, in the depths of night, he found himself remembering the very last time he’d seen his friend. William had leaned out the window of the carriage that was taking him down to Oxford and shouted David’s name. David had been working in one of his father’s fields. He’d run to the road, waving madly, getting there just in time to see the carriage disappearing into the distance.

That last glimpse had been fleeting. The time before had been a week earlier. That was the day David’s father had almost disowned him. Because of a kiss.

The dream version of William might try to take David’s cock in his mouth, but the real William never had. There had never been anything like that between them, no matter what David’s father might have thought. Just a handful of kisses. Three to be precise. Three heart-thundering, soul-stealing kisses.

David knew it was wrong to get down on his knees and take a man’s cock in his mouth. He lived with the torment that visited him every time he succumbed to his weakness. Those kisses with William were different, though. David had never been able to truly reconcile himself to what his father had said to him the day he’d caught them—that their kiss was evil in God’s eyes.

He’d pleaded with his father to understand. He and William were loving friends, like David and Jonathan in the Bible. But his father had just become more and more enraged until finally he’d cracked and knocked David to the ground with a punch from one of his work-hardened fists.

The love David had felt for William all those years ago had been pure, untainted by the lust that troubled his dreams now.

As he lay there in the dark, sleepless in his lonely bed, David wished he could recapture that feeling. If only for one hour.

Chapter Six

“You’d better stay for dinner.”

It wasn’t so much an invitation as an order, though Chalmers was smiling as he leaned back in his chair. They’d been working in Chalmers’s study all day, honing the argument for the first hearing of Mr. MacAllister’s case tomorrow. The clock on the mantelpiece had just chimed six.

“Mrs. Chalmers has invited some young gentleman visiting from London for dinner,” the older man continued. “I think she’s got Elizabeth married off to him already, in her own head.”

“In that case, I shouldn’t intrude,” David said as he tied up his papers in a loose bundle.

“Nonsense. It’ll be no trouble to lay another place for you, and it always does to have more than one eligible gentleman at the table when there are four young ladies.”

“I’m hardly eligible,” David scoffed.

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Chalmers said drily. “Besides, you’ll be eligible in time. Maybe you’ll end up occupying some great baronial pile like our friend Mr. Jeffrey.”

David laughed. Jeffrey was an original, and his choice of home reflected that. Chalmers, however, was more typical of their profession. He lived in the New Town, in a terraced townhouse, right at the end of a long, curving crescent. It was precisely the sort of house that David hoped to live in one day. And who would not? Who would not prefer the elegantly mathematical symmetry of the New Town to the tumbledown filth and clutter of the Old Town? No wonder Chalmers had asked David to come to his house to work on the case rather than travelling in to the Lawnmarket, where he’d have to push his way through hordes of hawkers and beggars and prostitutes before he even reached the faculty library.

Chalmers gave a yawn, peeling off his spectacles and scrubbing his hands over his face as David packed up his papers.

“Well, we’ve done a good day’s work,” he said, rising from his seat at the desk they’d shared all day. “And I, for one, don’t intend to give it another thought before tomorrow’s hearing. Let’s have a drink.”

David smiled at how unfazed Chalmers was at the prospect of tomorrow’s hearing. If David were doing the speaking, he’d have spent the whole evening going over his submissions again. But his role tomorrow would be limited to listening and note-taking.

Chalmers crossed the room, walking past a full wall lined with books. Legal treatises, historical monographs, philosophical works. The man, David had discovered, was a bibliophile. But for now, Chalmers was happy to ignore his books, stopping in front of a cabinet in the corner of the room which, once opened, revealed several decanters. He withdrew one, half full of amber liquor.